Information technology is changing rapidly and now forms an invisible layer that increasingly touches nearly every aspect of business and social life. An emerging computer model known as cloud computing addresses the explosive growth of Internet-connected devices, and complements the increasing presence of technology in today's world. Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of the service.
Cloud computing is massively scalable, provides a superior user experience, and is characterized by new, Internet-driven economics. In one perspective, cloud computing involves storage and execution of business data inside a cloud which is a mesh of inter-connected data centers, computing units and storage systems spread across geographies.
Because of the diverse and distributed nature of cloud computing, the data, applications, and infrastructure used in cloud computing may be located worldwide. It is often the case that a user does not know where their data is physically stored in a cloud computing environment, and this model works well for users that are not concerned with the geographic region of their stored data.